AI infrastructure: AWS unveils AI Factories and Nova – News

Amazon Web Services Inc. is accelerating a new era of data-center modernization as enterprises reshape how they deploy artificial intelligence and AI infrastructure at scale.

With its new AI Factories model, AWS is bringing full-stack systems directly into existing customer data centers, narrowing the divide between cloud innovation and on-prem control. The shift signals a market hungry for speed, sovereignty and hands-on oversight of high-value AI workloads — and a cloud provider intent on meeting that demand head-on.

“AI Factories is a big conversation” said Julia White (pictured), vice president and chief marketing officer at AWS. “What we’re bringing forward is a very opinionated AWS AI factory that gives customers that ability to build out the AI infrastructure they need, particularly for highly regulated sovereign needs on a very large scale. We’ve had almost 20 years of know-how of how to do this at scale better than anybody. Fusing that with this kind of unique customer optimization and how we do it is the genesis of that idea.”

White spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the company’s various AI announcements this week fit with its infrastructure strategy for the enterprise.

Models to drive AI infrastructure

Along with the news surrounding AI Factories, AWS also unveiled a major initiative to expand its Nova foundation model platform with the launch of Nova Forge, a “first-of-its-kind” service to train and build custom frontier AI models. The move by AWS was a key step into the world of frontier model reasoning, advanced problem-solving capabilities for AI that moves from basic information retrieval to problem-solving and logical deduction. The focus was on helping customers fine-tune models for desired results, White explained.

“There’s limitations to how much you can do with fine-tuning,” she said. “How could we fundamentally change that? That was the invention, the invention of Nova Forge, which is the first-ever ability for customers to take foundation models, Nova, and bring their own data and mix it with Amazon-provided data and actually start training the model.”

Model training still requires strong compute. This week, AWS announced general availability for Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by the new three-nanometer Trainium3 AI chip. AWS also previewed Trainium4, which was expected to deliver major gains in FP4 and FP8 performance and memory bandwidth.

“We’re seeing our third generation show up and…just absolutely crush that price/performance promise for our customers,” White said. “Each one of these generations is big, it’s not incremental, big step function changes. Obviously, that’s a huge driver of what people can do. Because these are our chips, we can just absolutely optimize every aspect of what we do across the infrastructure from top to bottom.”

From AI factories to frontier models and chips, the central message from AWS is that it is building AI infrastructure to support any enterprise need. That includes the proliferating field of agents, which businesses are beginning to build and implement for key tasks throughout organizations, White noted.

“Go back to the very beginning of AWS and cloud,” she said. “When AWS was invented, a small business could have the same technology capabilities as a big enterprise. The same point of this agentic approach that we have is we’re showing people what amazing looks like from an agent outcome. We’re giving every single person, big, small, otherwise, the tools to build whatever they might need.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

Photo: News